How Black Diamond Equipment Rental is Using Connected Assets to Speed Up Exception Reporting
Faith Kubicki
In the equipment rental industry, you don’t have time to check in on every part of your business, every single day. What you do need to know is when something isn’t as expected – that way you can take action before it becomes a major problem.
That’s where exception reporting comes in particularly handy.
With Connected Assets, it’s easy to find – and fix – situations where something isn’t quite right. Issues are proactively brought to your team’s attention, and you know that nothing is slipping through the cracks.
Here’s how Black Diamond Equipment Rental is using InTempo MX to speed up their exception reporting.
“At Black Diamond Equipment Rental, we have roughly 1,500 pieces of motorized equipment distributed across six different states.
I was thinking about what InTempo MX really means to me, and it really means excellence in exception reporting. [Connected Assets is all about] looking for exceptions to what you expect to happen and being able to find them efficiently. This is the best tool I've ever found for that.
People work hard, but they make errors. What happens if you’re 90% correct? That’s pretty good, but let’s add thousands of assets, thousands of contracts, thousands of telematics units. There’s going to be problems. Nobody is perfect. So, what you’re looking for are these exceptions, which are relatively rare but can be really important. Sometimes, they can have three-, four-, or five-digit financial figured attached to them…so it’s [a matter of figuring out] how you can do this quickly, efficiently, and accurately.
Five Key Exceptions Connected Assets Easily Illustrate
Equipment That’s Marked as Available But Not Physically Located in the Yard
“One example is being able to see what’s available for rent that’s not physically located in the yard. For instance…if you see an excavator out in the middle of the woods in West Virginia, why is it on a contract? That’s the first question I’d ask. Believe it or not, items go out on trucks from our yards not on contract; we don’t want to catch them later down the road during a cycle count. People picking up equipment have lists [to follow], but the reality is, they can just forget. There’s always something that needs to be picked up more urgently, so this is a very quick way to see what’s been on pick up for too long.
Equipment That’s Scheduled for Service but Also in Status: Available
“I like looking for what’s available for service but also in status available. That’s going to tell me where service guys may have missed complete rental checks.”
Required Service(s) That Are Ignored or Deprioritized
“You can see equipment that technicians might be avoiding servicing due to preference. If you look at a tech’s geographic area and see that there are no light plants for service but there are excavators…that begs the question…is he looking for the easy work?”
Equipment That’s Being Operated When On Pickup
“I also have an exception report for equipment that’s being operated when it’s on pickup. Are there freebies out there that we don’t know about? Everything should be coded to a contract with their sales rep.”
Equipment That’s Assigned to the Wrong Job Location
Job locations on contracts are also terribly important. We do a lot of demand billing in oil and gas and we have to have our sites correct for the contracts. These companies have a tendency to move the equipment but not always tell us. [To them], it’s still with the same customer, but [to us], it matters which site it’s on. So, what I did was build a bunch of sites in InTempo MX so the Oil and Gas Billing Team can quickly click through and see which machine is where really quickly.
Displaying Exceptions in a Visual Way
It’s not just getting the insights; it’s getting them in a way that supports fast and timely decision-making.
With Connected Assets, you’re not stuck reading through line after line of an Excel spreadsheet. Data visualization makes your needs clear – immediately.
“In real estate, they say location, location, location. In this world, it’s filter, filter, filter. The best thing is that once you filter, you can actually see [your equipment] on a map. You’re not looking at a long list or a table or even a dashboard – you actually see it on a physical map.
So, whatever combination of things that you can come up that you find important as an organization, you can very quickly filter for what you are looking for. (For instance, utilization after being put on pickup.)
Without the filter tool, I’d be going into a reporting tool and downloading our Equipment Master File to pull utilization out of and track. I can merge them in Excel, but with [Connected Assets], anyone in the company can very quickly see what’s being used.
How These Insights Add Up To a Better Equipment Rental Business
As Black Diamond sees it:
“How do we understand the decisions we made so when we have to make [similar] decisions in the future, we’re driving business forward and growing? How can we make a better decision?
They’re also looking at the impact the technologies can make on their team.
“Is the work environment better for our team members?
InTempo MX is very easy to use. We want to retain our team members. Spending a lot of money training them and bringing them up to speed…you don’t want them to all be frustrated at the counter, at the desk, or on the service side. We want them to be able to see that they’re part of the process, and see on their screen: here’s the work we need to do.”
And lastly, how it impacts their ability to better serve their valued customers:
“We like to grow with our customers. That’s key. Some of our customers are in growth relationships with us. We rent everything they need right now, but they’re also getting bigger – just like us – and so we really want to be in that relationship with them and have a tool that allows us to grow with them.
This is where the value of InTempo MX comes in.
We can pull telematics from both our OEM sources as well as our own devices, all together on one platform, tied together with our ERP. [InTempo MX] is the only thing out there that does this. We’re going to improve profitability by increasing efficiency and decreasing cost.”
Discover Connected Assets for More Insightful Exception Reporting at Your Equipment Rental Business
We built our Connected Assets platform to help independent rental companies level the playing field with the industry’s largest players. Whether your fleet is a few dozen assets or a few thousand, we’re here to help you manage it more efficiently. Request a demo here, or contact our team to learn more about integrated telematics.
